--- In cybalist@..., "michael_donne" <michael_donne@...> wrote:
> Thanks for the interesting discussion of this issue. I've asked
> someone to send me a copy of Hock's paper where he refutes Misra.
I'm > putting my money on Hock. :-)
I see the strength of arguments against equating Vedic Sanskrit with
Proto-Indo-European because Sanskrit can also be shown to have
innovated.
Apart from the narrow passes through which dialects should have moved
out in stages, are there linguistic arguments strong enough to
counter, 'PIE in India'. Here are some Hock's views on Misra.
"A priori, there is a possible alternative to Misra's failed attempt
to identify Vedic Sanskrit with Proto-Indo-European and in so doing
to establish that the Indo-Aryans did not migrate to India from the
outside. This alternative would consist in claiming that Proto-Indo-
European -- as ussually reconstructed and thus distinct from Vedic
Sanskrit -- was originally spoken in India, that the speakers of Indo-
Aryan remained in India, and that the speakers of all other Indo-
European languages migrated out of India...This hypothesis might be
considered to be supported by the fact that Indo-Europeanists have
not been able to agree on an area that might be identified as the
original home of Proto-Indo-European. (For a recent discussion with
references to literature see Hock and Joseph 1996: 516-523; Misra, p.
100). A priori it might well be argued that given this lack of
agreement, any area is as good a candidate for being the original
home as any other -- so why not India?
"Moreover, the outward migration of the Romany is not the only known
instance of speakers of Indo-Aryan languages moving north and out of
India. As noted in Hock 1996 (with references), both Gandhari Prakrit
(in medieval Khotan and farther east), and Parya (in modern
Uzbekistan) have been transplanted out of India through migration;
and Dumaki (close to present-day Shina) has moved to the outer
northwestern edge of South Asia. In principle, then, there would be
even more precedent for outward migration than argued for by Misra
(who only considered Romany).
"The 'PIE-in-India' hypothesis is not so easily refuted as
the 'Sanskrit origin' hypothesis, since it is not based on 'hard-
core' linguistic evidence, such as sound changes, which can be
subjected to critical and definitive analysis. Its cogency can be
assessed only i8n terms of circumstantial arguments, especially
arguments based on plausibility and simplicity.
"Right at the outset, however, it should be noted that the two
preceding arguments in favor of 'PIE in India' are not sufficient to
prove the hypothesis -- at best, they merely suggest that there are
no obstacles to the hypothesis...
"To support this claim it would be necessary to establish a scenario
of migrations that would account for the dialectological
relationships between the early Indo-European languages. As is well-
known, these relationships cannot be fully accounted for in terms of
a family tree diagram...a large amount of linguistic evidence
indicates that the Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian etc.)
separated earliest from the rest of the Indo-European languages.
Further, recent arguments make it highly plausible that the Tocharian
languages were next in line to separate (see Winter 1997). As is also
well known, the early Indo-European languages exhibit linguistic
alignments which cannot be captured by a tree diagram, but which
require a dialectological approach that maps out a set of
intersecting 'isoglosses' which define areas with shared
features...these relationships reflect a stage at which the different
Indo-European languages were still just dialects of the ancestral
language and as such interacted with each other in the same way as
the dialects of modern languages...
"To be able to account for these dialectological relationships,
the 'Out of India' approach would have to assume, first, that these
relationships reflect a stage of dialectical diversity in a Proto-
Indo-European ancestor language located WITHIN INDIA. While this
assuption is not in itself improbable, it has consequences which, to
put it midly, border on the improbable, and certainly would violate
bacis principles of simplicity. What would have to be assumed is that
the various Indo-European languages mved out of India in such a
manner that they maintained their relative position to each other
during and after the migration. However, given the bottle-neck nature
of the route(s) out of India, it would be immensely difficicult to do
so...
"By contrast, there is no problem if we accept the view that Proto-
Indo_European was spoken somewhere within a vast area 'from East
Central Europe to Eastern Russia' (Hock and Joseph 1996: 523)..."(HH
Hock, 1999, pp. 11-17)